In recent years, it has been growing in various fields to store and manage various types of information by a computer as electronic documents. For example, in the manufacturing industry, objects for distribution are managed as electronic documents and also information for distribution targets of each object for distribution is managed as electronic documents (expressed as a distribution-target management table hereinafter) each having contents as shown in FIG. 12.
As well known, there are various types of information managed by a computer, and a document represented by the distribution-target management table shown in FIG. 12 includes attribute information such as a corporate organization name and a corporate organization code in which master information of the document may be managed by some other information processing unit. The corporate organization names are names of units constituting the organization to which an object for distribution belongs (in short, to which an object for distribution is to be distributed), and each corporate organization code is an information obtained by encoding a corporate organization name consisting of Chinese or other characters so as to easily handle the name by a computer.
Namely, the document like the distribution-target management table is required to be changed, when a corporate organization or so is changed, the contents in accordance with its change, while the information for the corporate organization or so may, in many cases, actually be managed by completely different information processing unit. However, in a device based on the conventional technology for managing documents such as the distribution-target management tables (e.g., technology disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. HEI 7-319921 or Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. HEI 8-16757), a case where attribute information may be changed by some other information processing unit has not been considered.
Therefore, when a distribution target of an object for distribution is specified according to the distribution-target management table of the object for distribution managed by the conventional type of device, there has often occurred cases where the distribution target is no more in-charge of the object for distribution or where the distribution target itself does not exist.